Breast cancer is the most commonly occurring cancer for women around the world, and much effort has been spent in the development of therapies to treat this disease. Among these treatments, chemotherapy has been shown to be among the most effective methods; however, the drugs used in these therapies can have adverse side effects, the most serious of which is toxicity to the heart. In addition to tissue damage to the heart, chemotherapeutic breast cancer drugs can also affect the heart's pumping ability or result in clinical heart failure.

In order to avoid these problems, efforts are made to monitor the heart of patients who are undergoing chemotherapeutic treatment for breast cancer and to adjust their treatment levels accordingly. Current methods to monitor the heart include the use of echocardiograms and other imaging procedures, as well as taking biopsies of the heart. But the imaging methods only detect late-stage, irreversible cardiac failure and biopsies are highly invasive and are physically painful for the patient.

There are alternative monitoring systems that can be created in the laboratory to mimic what is happening in the body. These organs-on-a-chip models consist of a silicone chip with compartments for culturing specific types of live human tissues. The compartments are connected to microfluidic channels through which oxygen and nutrient media are pumped and circulated. The tissue cells normally secrete molecules called biomarkers into the surrounding medium, which are good indicators of their health and function. The levels of these biomarkers can then be measured in order to determine the condition of the tissues. Recently, methods have been successful in creating simple systems to monitor heart toxicity from breast cancer drugs in selected patients, but, to date, there have been few attempts to produce such a system in a larger, more comprehensive and reliable model. A collaborative team, which includes a group from the Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation, has developed an organs-on-a-chip system that more widely examines the responses of breast cancer and heart tissues to therapeutic breast cancer drugs. For their system, they chose to measure two cardiac biomarkers which are produced by healthy heart cells and one biomarker that is produced by actively growing breast cancer cells. Included in the study were tests of both healthy and artificially-induced damaged heart tissues, to mirror the possible heart conditions of breast cancer patients prior to chemotherapy. They also devised added features to the system to enhance its capabilities.

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